The Financial Times has won two prestigious Eppy awards for excellence in online journalism.

The UK Austerity Audit, a data-led project investigating the impact of sweeping benefit changes on local economies, won in the best investigative feature category and the FT picked up a second gong for the best mobile website. Read more

New research from Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation and the Open Data Institute places the UK at the top of the league table for open data, ahead of the United States.

The report comes ahead of an open government summit in London where David Cameron is to announce a proposal for a public register of company ownership which will show who ultimately owns and controls businesses.

The survey of the state of open data in 77 counties, notes that 55 per cent of the countries surveyed now have open data initiatives, but reiterates familiar problems for all users of open data:

Valuable but potentially controversial datasets – such as company registers and land registers – are among the least likely to be openly released

When they are released, government datasets are often issued in inaccessible formats

Less than 7 per cent of the datasets surveyed are published in both machine readable forms and under open licences

Data is often released only in highly aggregated forms

Whilst countries might boast about releasing hundreds of datasets, if they aren’t the numbers demanded by citizens or those than can enable transparency or innovation there is little potential to deliver impact